Delam'ed and buckled dominator (repair photos)

10-03-2012, 02:26 PM

This summer i had a lot of fun (too much, perhaps) kitesurfing with my FST dominator. After a few sessions i noticed the deck becoming soft and i decided to remove the wax to see the extent of the damage. To my surprise the board had a buckled deck, the outer fiberglass layer was broken and water had gotten inside the board (panic!)

I decided to repair it myself and take some photos along the way to share here with anyone else having the same problem. For more information about repairing epoxy sandwich boards like firewires go to Eva Hollmann's fantastic webpage http://www.boardlady.com/

First step in repairing a soft deck should be to make some holes around the damaged area and inject poliurethane foam under the sandwich layer to fill the voids between the pvc and the polystyrene core. In this case, driven by panic and seeing water coming out of the cracks in the fiberglass, i decided to sand the whole thing down to expose the polystyrene core and let it dry for a couple of weeks:

Only after the board was completely dry did i inject polyurethane foam inside the polystyrene. The best thing would be to use a two component PU liquid system, but that's not easy to find so i used common PU foam spray:

After that comes the more complicated part. To recover the board's integrity we need to redo the pvc sandwich layer, so the whole are needs to be carefully sanded and a new layer of 3mm PVC foam (divinycell or corecell) needs to be glued with epoxy resin and a layer of 4oz fiberglass to the beveled hole. The gluing has to be done under a lot of pressure to remove any air and excess resin between the layers. In the case of small holes this can be done using weights to press down on the pvc, but ideally one should do it using a vacuum pump and a vacuum bag:

In this case I used an old vacuum pump, some pvc tubing and some polypropylene film i had left after covering my kids schoolbooks. Before gluing the bag with vacuum tape it's also good to cover the area with waxed paper (or peel ply) and a breather cloth (or in my case mosquito net) to allow the air to flow inside the bag. I got everything ready, mixed the epoxy resin, sealed the bag and left the pump pulling vacuum for around 5 hours (until the resin was set):

Comment

Thanks a lot for your comments guys. I'm actually just an amateur doing repairs. It's just that i've been surfing and repairing my own boards for close to 30 years. I've also been kitesurfing since 2003 and since then i've "destroyed" a few sandwich boards, so i decided to learn how to repair them.

I think there's a bit of misconception about the difficulty of repairing epoxy/sandwich boards and they are really no harder to repair than a regular PU/polyester board once you learn how to do it. That's why i decided to share this information here.

I like Firewire shapes a lot, but most of all i love the technology (especially FST) precisely because the boards are much more durable than pu/polyester boards and they look and fucntion better even after being repaired.

Thats is awesome - A talented man, my brother is also very good at these, having smashed us quite a few firewire boards (drove over the last one) take the time and care and a good job can be done, Ive seem many so called pro repairs which would make you laugh or cry...

Comment

Thanks a lot for your comments guys. I'm actually just an amateur doing repairs. It's just that i've been surfing and repairing my own boards for close to 30 years. I've also been kitesurfing since 2003 and since then i've "destroyed" a few sandwich boards, so i decided to learn how to repair them.

I think there's a bit of misconception about the difficulty of repairing epoxy/sandwich boards and they are really no harder to repair than a regular PU/polyester board once you learn how to do it. That's why i decided to share this information here.

I like Firewire shapes a lot, but most of all i love the technology (especially FST) precisely because the boards are much more durable than pu/polyester boards and they look and fucntion better even after being repaired.

I will be taking a swag of FW boards to Portugal next year...I will hunt you down for a repair if I break one ( looks very possible at supertubos !!) LOL.